D’you Remember Yer Man, celebrating a host of Dublin characters

A book celebrating some of Dublin’s most well-known characters was released in late October and includes the stories of a host of individuals who roamed The Liberties.

D’you Remember Yer Man is written by Bobby Aherne who spent much of his free time over the past two years researching the book.

The book tells the stories of 100 of Dublin’s most beloved characters including the likes of Bang Bang, the Bird Flanagan, Lugs Branigan and Zozimus.

“The Liberties is the heart of Dublin in terms of most of these characters. There’s a guy called the Bird Flanagan who has a pub named after him in Rialto,” Aherne said.

“Bang Bang was always around The Liberties shooting people with his key back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. A lot of them, if not being from the Liberties, would have been well-known around there,” he added.

The book features illustrations by Ruan van Vliet who Aherne said became involved in the book by coincidence.

“In my head, from the start this book was going to be modelled on The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges which is an alphabetical collection of anecdotes about loads of different mythical creatures and I thought that would be a fun model to base this book on.

“At some point, Ruan started up a blog online drawing these characters who appeared in Borges’ book and I thought it was a nice coincidence because Ruan is very talented as an artist and a designer and he also had a great interest in this old book of imaginary beings.”

The book is available for purchase online through the publisher New Island for the moderate sum of €7.99.